Say Anything Blog

As the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s largest investment banks Henry Paulson announces a new initiative called HOPE NOW.
Hmmm leaves a CEO position at Goldman Sachs to take a $185,000 job as Treasury Secretary. Odd.

Minyanville’s daily Five Things You Need to Know to stay ahead of the pack on Wall Street:

1.  U.S. Announces Major Toll Increase on Road to Serfdom

Hahaha. That headline is a funny joke.  Except it is not a joke at all, but true in every sense of unironic tragedy and awfulness.  This morning Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson appeared on television and announced the latest coalition of do-gooders, this time a collection of 11 of the largest mortgage service companies in the U.S, representing 60% of all mortgages, coming together to help counsel and repair the properties they now own, like so many looters working together to rebuild a burned out liquor store the morning after; the gesture is appreciated.  The hangover well-earned.

The real joke, the irony of it all, is that this charade of free-market capitalism can get paraded in front of a daily audience at all, much less an audience of too-willing serfs, eager to lap up any spillage from this government’s ladle of grim-faced collectivism wrapped in flag-waving triumph.

Steeped further in irony, and near impossible to tell if it was intended as a finger in the eye to the American middle class, or was simply an unintentional fragment of idiocy that slipped through the cracks, is the name this new initiative carries:  HOPE NOW.  The emphasis on the name is it’s own. The New York Times printed it in all-caps, presumably not a typo.

Believe me when I say that this is not our defining “let them eat cake” moment.  That’s like blaming the looters for the power failure.  The savage destruction of the dollar, its debasement, the insidious transfer of wealth by hyperinflationary Federal Reserve policies intent on serving a small collective of wealthy decision-makers and rule makers is the circle in the pond created by this tiny pebble.  Eh, so what?  If not a tiny pebble in the pond, then an aggravating pebble in the shoe of the wealthy few as they ride the backs of the middle class off into the sunset. 

The confusion we live in these days is a deep one, traumatic in its intensity and violence.  While chasing debt-soaked dollars down a filthy, rusty drainpipe, it’s hard to differentiate between friends and enemies.  From gutter height, everyone looks like an enemy.  And that’s exactly how it’s meant to be; welcome to the new class war pitching the dissolving middle class against itself in one long reality TV show.  Rich versus poor is a fairy tale.  Middle class versus itself is the reality.  The confusion is real, and it’s intentional.

Meanwhile, the incremental transfer of wealth from the middle class to Asia’s poor perpetuates itself, both as a cause of this new class war, and most bitterly, also as an effect; a horrible cycle of debt addiction spiraling inward and feeding on itself, an autoimmune deficiency attacking itself.  The code word for this transfer is globalization.  It’s real name is looting.

Fifty years ago the U.S. manufactured things and produced tangible goods that allowed our fathers and grandfathers to save and invest in their families, their homes.  God help us for even re-imagining what it was like to own something.  Those memories lie flat now in tattered photo albums, a handful of aging black and white snapshots peeling away from the page as the glue holding them in place dissolves.

But you know what?  The stock market is now at an all-time high.  Man, what a cruel and vicious joke.  Didn’t anyone tell you that the S&P 500 stock market index has lost 60% of its value in real terms since 2000?  Well, if you sit high enough in the saddle, maybe you won’t notice the stench of the excrement you’re trampling.  In this case, that excrement is denominated in dollars.

Mar. 5, 2007 (iTulip.com)
A 60 Minutes interview with David Walker

David Walker is an accountant, the nation’s top accountant to be exact, the comptroller general of the United States. He has totaled up our government’s income, liabilities, and future from surpluses to huge deficits and our loobligations and concluded the numbers simply don’t add up. And he’s not alone. Its been called the “dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows” – a set of financial truths so inconvenient that most elected officials don’t even want to talk about them, which is exactly why David Walker does.

“I would argue that the most serious threat to the United States is not someone hiding in a cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan but our own fiscal irresponsibility,”

“I’m going to show you some numbers…they’re all big and they’re all bad,”

He calls it a fiscal wake up tour, and he is telling civic groups, university forums and newspaper editorial boards that the U.S. has spent, promised, and borrowed itself into such a deep hole it will be unable to climb out if it doesn’t act now. As Walker sees it, the survival of the republic is at stake.

“What’s going on right now is we’re spending more money than we make…we’re charging it to credit card…and expecting our grandchildren to pay for it. And that’s absolutely outrageous,” he told the editorial board of the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

“We suffer from a fiscal cancer. It is growing within us. And if we do not treat it, it could have catastrophic consequences for our country,” Walker replies.

The cancer, Walker says, are massive entitlement programs we can no longer afford, exacerbated by a demographic glitch that began more than 60 years ago—a dramatic spike in the fertility rate called the “baby boom.”

“If nothing changes, the federal government’s not gonna be able to do much more than pay interest on the mounting debt and some entitlement benefits. It won’t have money left for anything else – national defense, homeland security, education, you name it,” Walker warns.

“The prescription drug bill was probably the most fiscally irresponsible piece of legislation since the 1960s,” Walker argues.

Asked why, Walker says, “Well, because we promise way more than we can afford to keep. Eight trillion dollars added to what was already a 15 to $20 trillion under-funding. We’re not being realistic. We can’t afford the promises we’ve already made, much less to be able, piling on top of ‘em.”

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke validated much of Walker’s take on the situation at congressional hearings this year, and so did ranking Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee. Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota is the Chairman.

Sen. Conrad thinks David Walker is “providing an enormous public service.”

Asked if he agrees with Walker’s figures and his projections, Sen. Conrad says, “I do. You know, I mean we could always question the precise nature of this projection or that projection. But, that misses the point. The larger story that he is telling is exactly correct.”

Conrad acknowledges that most people in Washington are aware how bad the situation is. “They know in large measure here, Republicans and Democrats, that we are on a course that doesn’t add up,” the senator tells Kroft.

Link To 60 Minutes interview

I’m sure you would rather talk about Al Gore, Global Warming or Writing Tips, but I felt with all the chatting goin on about funding cuts for the troops in Iraq that this may be an interesting topic.

Wounded Soldiers Detail Poor Living Conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center
“Soldiers get less than they deserve from a system seemingly designed and run to cut the costs associated with fighting this war,” Staff Sgt. John Daniel Shannon told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s national security panel. Shannon was injured by a gunshot wound to the head during a firefight with insurgents in Iraq in 2004.

“The really sad thing is that surviving veterans from every war we’ve every fought detail the same basic story. A story about neglect, lack of advocacy and frustration with military bureaucracy,” Shannon said.  Link

Vets Face More Health-Care Cuts
From budget cuts to homeless vets

The U. S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) says the nation’s homeless veterans are mostly males (4 % are females). The vast majority are single, most come from poor, disadvantaged communities, 45% suffer from mental illness, and half have substance abuse problems. America’s homeless veterans have served in World War II, Korean War, Cold War, Vietnam War, Grenada, Panama, Lebanon, Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan), Operation Iraqi Freedom, or the military’s anti-drug cultivation efforts in South America. Forty-seven percent of homeless veterans served during the Vietnam Era. More than 67% served our country for at least three years and 33% were stationed in a war zone. Link

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Are we supporting our troops?

By Max Fraad Wolff

There are some strange facts about the asset and trade positions of the US economy in the globalizing economy. The United States runs massive and growing trade deficits, is borrowing at a clip that would arouse the suspicions of a casino pit boss, and has been selling its assets to anyone who will buy. In the past 24 months, the US balance on goods and services comes in just shy of negative-$1.5 trillion. Across the same period, the US has sunk further into debt to the rest of the world.

For 2006, exports of US$1.4378 trillion and imports of $2.2014 trillion resulted in a goods and services deficit of $763.6 billion,

$46.9 billion more than the 2005 deficit of $716.7 billion. For goods, exports were $1.0237 trillion and imports were $1.8598 trillion, resulting in a goods deficit of $836.1 billion, $53.3 billion more than the 2005 deficit of $782.7 billion.

As a result of that shortfall the US has been selling assets and borrowing. The net international investment position (NIIP) is the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s broadest measure of US-owned foreign assets less foreign-owned US assets.

There has been a dramatic and sustained deterioration in the US NIIP over the past several decades. Between 1986 and 1988, the US transformed itself from creditor to the world to debtor extraordinaire. It has never looked back, nor has it been forced to.

Article
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/IB27Dj02.html

The chickens are coming home to roost. While some people buy gold in preparation for this, I’m buying guns.I think my hedge will be a little more effective if our worst fears are realized.

“Whoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce.”(Paul Warburg, drafter of the Federal Reserve Act)

“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation and I care not who makes its laws.”(Mayer Amschel Rothschild)

Tax dollars at work

“Hey there, big guy. Having a few drinks?” a female voice says a few seconds after an approaching male sets off a motion sensor in the device. “It’s time to call a cab or ask a sober friend for a ride home.”

The message is a way to reach one group that is a target of state safety campaigns, Transportation Department spokesman S.U. Mahesh said. Men commit about three times as many drunken-driving infractions as women.

The devices are manufactured by a New York-based company called Healthquest Technologies Inc., which also sells a product for women’s restrooms that flashes messages on a screen affixed to the stall door.

The urinal version, called a Wizmark Interactive Urinal Communicator, was invented by Richard Deutsch, who says there’s no other device like it on the market.

Public awareness campaigns in New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Australia have used the devices, as have commercial advertisers.

“The idea is based on the concept that there is no more captive audience than a guy standing at a urinal,” Deutsch said. “You can’t look right and you can’t look left; you’ve got to look at the ad.”

In New Mexico’s case, the device uses the DWI slogan that has appeared in recent Transportation Department television commercials and printed material: You drink, you drive, you lose.

Tom Trowbridge, who works in the department’s marketing division, said he plans to distribute the devices to Santa Fe bars and restaurants—including the first local participant, Tiny’s Restaurant and Lounge—as well as establishments in Farmington, Gallup and Las Cruces. Some Albuquerque bars installed the devices this week.

The state spent $21 for each talking urinal cake for the pilot program but will ask bars and restaurants to pay for future orders if the devices catch on, Mahesh said.

The cakes have enough battery power to last about three months.
About 500 urinal cakes with an audio message are being distributed to bars and restaurants in the state.

Australian artist Justine Cooper created the marketing campaign for a non-existent drug called Havidol for Dysphoric Social Attention Consumption Deficit Anxiety Disorder (DSACDAD), which she also invented.

But the multi-media exhibit at the Daneyal Mahmood Gallery in New York, which includes a Web site, mock television and print advertisements and billboards is so convincing people think it is authentic.

“People have walked into the gallery and thought it was real,” Mahmood said in an interview.

“They didn’t get the fact that this was a parody or satire.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070216/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_drug_fake